While same-sex marriage advocates were mostly united in their praise of “a historic turning point,” Obama took care to present his position as a personal one—and not one that would necessarily trigger any official action in his roles as president and head of the Democratic Party.

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important forme to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Obama told Robin Roberts (emphases mine).

“The president stressed that this is a personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states’ [sic] deciding the issue on their own,” reported ABC, which has aired excerpts of the interview but has yet to release it in full.

“[B]y endorsing a ‘states’ rights’ approach to same-sex marriage, Obama essentially preserves the current status quo in which a handful of states recognize same-sex marriage and many states have constitutional bans against them,” wrote Nation editor Richard Kim. “That is not marriage equality, and does not even reach the standard Obama previously embraced of equal rights and recognitions.”

It remains unclear what, if anything, Obama’s personal embrace of same-sex marriage will mean in his roles as president, and head of the Democratic Party.

The one time Obama offered a categorical answer on what may supporters see as a civil rights question was in 1996, when as a candidate for the Illinois state Senate he wrote in response to a survey from a gay paper: “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.”

That shorter response, far more sweeping and categorical than what he said Wednesday, was repudiated last year by White House communications director Dan Pfeiffer, who said that despite Obama’s signature, “the answers were actually filled out by someone else” and didn’t reflect Obama’s view at the time.